Our friend and site-contributor, David Whidden, has published his Christ the Light: The Theology of Light and Illumination in Thomas Aquinas through Fortress Press's 'Emerging Scholars' series (link). Here's a scrape from the publisher's site about it:

Light is one of the most ancient and significant metaphors adopted by Christianity by which to understand the significance of Jesus Christ. The Easter liturgy, for instance, is marked by beautiful and powerful rituals proclaiming Christ as the light of the world in his death and resurrection. That understanding developed over subsequent centuries into a larger doctrine of illumination—how Christians come to understand and know God through Christ the Light. In this work, David Whidden takes up that theme in contesting a standard paradigm of interpretation that asserts that Aquinas eliminated the doctrine of illumination in his theology.

In Christ the Light, Whidden argues that illumination is a critical systematic motif in Aquinas’ theology, one that involves the nature of truth, knowledge, and God; at the root, Aquinas’ theology of light, or illumination, is christological, grounding human knowledge of God and eschatological beatitude. This volume establishes the theological network formed by the crucial motif of light/illumination in Aquinas, from how theology operates to the systematic, sacramental, and moral coordinates in Aquinas’ theology. Christ the Light thus provides a much needed and illuminating retrieval of the one of the most important and creative theologians in the western Christian tradition.

Everybody's book-buying choices are constrained these days, especially in academic institutions, where the pressure is on to contain costs. But a look-see at this book might encourage university libraries as well as individuals to pick up it up, for it has value across many areas of Thomas's thought.

Mark Johnson is an associate professor of Theology at Marquette University, and founded thomistica.net on Squarespace in November of 2004. He studied with James Weisheipl, Leonard Boyle, Walter Principe, and Lawrence Dewan, at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (Toronto, Canada).